The icing on the cake. Or is it frosting? The influence of group membership on children's lexical choices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using language to construct/negotiate identity and signal affiliation with others is a highly complex skill, and little is known about how this ability develops. Children clearly mirror lexical patterns in their local environment (e.g., Canadian children using zed instead of zee), but do children flexibly adapt their lexical choices on the fly in response to the word choices of different peer groups? To address this question, we examined the effect of group membership on 7- to 9-year-old children’s labeling of objects in a trivia-type game, exploring whether children were more likely to use a particular label if members of their “team” also used that label. In a pre-registered, online study, children (N = 72) were assigned to a team (red or green) and were asked during experimental trials to answer questions—which had multiple possible answers (e.g., blackboard or chalkboard)— after hearing two teammates and two opponents (all pre-recorded) respond to the same question. Results showed that children were significantly more likely to produce labels less commonly used by the community (i.e., dispreferred labels) when their teammates had produced dispreferred labels. Crucially, this effect was tied to group membership, and could not be explained by children simply mirroring the labels used by all children in the game. We discuss the implications of this study for understanding how children use language to construct their identities and position themselves in relation to others.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".